Arianna Huffington on our addiction to being busy, her out-of-body experience
and coping with her daughter’s cocaine problem

On Tuesday night the Chancellor of the Exchequer threw open the doors of Downing Street and allowed Arianna Huffington to launch her latest book in his living room.

Of course he did. La Huff has President Obama on speed dial and knows everyone from Oprah Winfrey to the Dalai Lama; she is the girl who grew up in a tiny flat in Athens but now lives in a sprawling property in Los Angeles, all by way of Cambridge University, where she studied economics and became the first foreign president of the Union.

Now a naturalised American, though still in possession of a fabulous Greek accent, La Huff is also a best-selling author of books on subjects as wide-ranging as feminism, Maria Callas and Picasso, books with titles such as Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe and the even-catchier Third World America: How Our Politicians Are Abandoning the Middle Class and Betraying the American Dream. Her latest simply trips off the tongue: Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Happier Life.

Anyway, Huffington is the kind of broad who sets up a news website, The Huffington Post, on a shoestring and then sells it to a huge media conglomerate six years later for $315 million (£190 million), still retaining full editorial control. She is a columnist and a political commentator and probably the world’s best networker, which explains why she was throwing the world’s most glamorous book launch. George Osborne made a gushing speech, Net-A-Porter’s Natalie Massenet looked on adoringly, and Princess Michael of Kent showed up wearing the vast diamond earrings she had lent La Huff for her wedding 28 years ago. It was quite a spectacle, really it was, with lavish canapés and endless Prosecco and society photographers on hand to capture every moment.

Watching Huffington glide through the room, a trail of acolytes with camera phones in her wake, she looked the very epitome of superwoman. Perfectly ironed hair: check. Great teeth: check. Make-up unsmudged despite it being hotter than the centre of earth in Downing Street: check. And yet all has not been easy in recent years. First, in 2007, she collapsed from exhaustion at home, hitting her head on the corner of her desk and breaking her cheekbone. When she came to, she found she was lying in a pool of her own blood.Then Huffington’s daughter called her from an emergency room near Yale, where she was studying at the time. Christina, then just 22, had been hospitalised for respiratory problems after taking too much cocaine.

“That was definitely the most terrifying moment [in my life],” says Huffington, 63, when we meet in her central London hotel room. “I was in New York at my apartment and I got in the car, talking to everyone I knew who could go and see her in the emergency room while I got to her. But what was interesting was that as soon as I saw her and knew that she was going to be fine physically, I felt grateful.

“Even in the middle of this crisis, I was just grateful she was alive. I was grateful that she wanted to get well and I was grateful that she had called me and had a loving family she felt she could rely on. Because if you’re not ready to get well, you probably don’t call your parents.”

Christina’s father is Michael Huffington, the former Republican congressman and oil billionaire who Arianna divorced after he came out as bisexual. Arianna tells me she doesn’t believe in marriage, “just really good divorces”, and the couple still holiday together for the sake of their two children.

Did either of them have any idea that their first-born had a problem with drugs? “Umm, you know, she had dealt with drugs before, when she was in high school,” says Huffington matter-of-factly. “But I thought it was over. She had also had an eating disorder. I could see that she was getting thinner but I thought we were having a resurgence of the eating disorder, not the drugs.”

Huff senior took Huff junior home to LA and got her into rehab. It was a difficult time because “I’m normally very open with my close friends and close colleagues, and I want them to be open with me because we are all part of the same tribe and we need to support each other. I tell all our editors [at The Huffington Post] that if there’s a problem in their life, if their child is sick or they’re having trouble with their marriage, you know, tell us. Don’t try and power through. But because it was Christina’s story and not mine I felt it was not for me to talk about.

“So I told my sister and family and Christina’s godmother [the television anchor Barbara Walters] and that was it. And that made it harder, because I was in the office knowing that she was having rehab at home. She was an outpatient and had a therapist and was going to AA every day. It was really intense, but I love AA!”

Christina is now 25, clean and sober and “she has a nice girlfriend”, says Huffington, confirming her elder daughter is also out and proud. The younger, Isabella, is 22 and an artist who has just graduated from Yale. They have both suffered from eating disorders, and though Huffington herself has never had problems, “my children have said that looking back, I’ve maybe been too conscious about what I eat. Once we were at lunch and I went for the bread basket and they both said, 'Mum, are you OK?’

“The moments I have with my daughters give meaning to everything else,” she says. They were partly the inspiration for Thrive, an unexpectedly spiritual book about the elusive work-life balance. In it she preaches the value of mindfulness and getting enough sleep and never, ever taking your phone into your bedroom. “Are you sleeping with your smart phone near you?” she asks, grabbing my arm. “You’re not going to do it any more!”

When Huffington goes out to dinner, she makes everyone put their mobiles in the centre of the table, with the first person to reach for theirs having to pay the entire bill. She bandies about terms like “email apnea” (the bad habit of shallow breathing when you’re in front of a screen, I learn) and “resource depletion” and refers to the “obnoxious room mates” in our heads who fill us with negativity. “There is no such thing as multi-tasking,” she says mock-seriously. “There is only task-switching.”

“You know, we need to unplug and recharge. Even God took the seventh day off,” she jokes to me. But only Huffington could unplug and recharge and then write a book about it. I tell her that I was surprised by Thrive; that she always struck me as the kind of woman who stomped around in seven-inch heels with a Blackberry clamped to each ear.

“Well, I can say that I have definitely done what you are describing, but I can also say that without a shadow of a doubt I am more effective, more productive and more creative now that I don’t do that any more. I think we’re addicted now, we are addicted to burnout. We’re addicted to being busy and boasting about being busy. And look at the language we use! 'I’m swamped’ or 'I’ll get back to you when I come up for air’. It’s ridiculous!”

Does she feel that she was always present for her daughters while they were growing up? “No,” she says straight away. “I’ve discussed this with them. I felt that I was physically present. I never missed a school recital or a school production where they were the lion in The Wizard of Oz. But was I fully present? Was my mind there? Not always. And that’s what the whole mindfulness movement is about. It’s about being 100 per cent present and not thinking what you’re doing next.”

Though she talks a lot about mindfulness, she also tells me about the time she got out of her mind – or more exactly, her body. She had just given birth to Christina and was very anxious. Her first child had been a still birth “and that was really the most painful thing. Because I was already 36 and I very much wanted to have children, and they didn’t know what had happened.” She was 38 when Christina came along and “I couldn’t let her go. They wanted to take her away to measure her and I said, 'No, no, no, you can measure her in front of me!’ But after I don’t know how many hours the nurse put her in her crib and I was going to sleep. Then I suddenly felt myself out of my body and seeing everything. I saw myself in bed and the whole room. I think that what I was seeing is what the Bible calls 'the peace that passes all understanding’. I had all this anxiety about taking Christina home, but in that moment all that worry passed and I had the sense that the blessings were here, that everything can be a mess and chaotic, but it can still be OK.”

She believes in the afterlife and though her family was not religious she remembers praying at the age of three. “Clearly there is something else going on,” she says. “You know, my second book was rejected by 36 publishers. I was living in London at the time and I was walking down the street [in the Seventies, Huffington was a fixture on the capital’s social scene, falling in love with the writer Bernard Levin and then leaving him and moving to New York because he didn’t want children]. I saw a Barclays bank. I walked in and asked the bank manager for a loan and for some reason he gave it to me. His name was Ian Bell and I still send him a [Christmas] card.”

I wonder where she is going with this. “And I talk about it a lot,” she says, as if reading my mind, “because I think so often in life we always think we are making everything happen, that we are alone in an indifferent universe. But often we get help from other people, from unexpected places. Like in fairytales, you have all these animals who come out of nowhere to help the hero or heroine who is lost in the dark forest. And in life there are helpful animals. They’re just disguised as human beings or bank managers.”

The Huffington Post doesn’t pay its bloggers, but meeting Huffington, I see how she gets away with it – she is charming and disarming, turning up with five pages of notes about me, and I think I would probably pay her to be my friend.

Is she really as happy and content as she makes out? “I feel that definitely this is the best time, though I say that knocking on wood.” She raps on the table. “Anything can happen. Life is fragile. But it’s just…” she thinks for a moment. “My attitude to what happens is ultimately more important than what happens.” And then she smiles.